You could look for academic conferences in your area of interest and see what people are working on [1]. It is not necessary to have particular degree for submitting your work to a conference. Since most review processes are double-blind no one would know at submission time anyways. Though, knowing the process and how a "typical" paper looks like, on which people in academia have an advantage, certainly helps a lot.

[1] E.g., https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/events/2022-....